HELP IN SUFFERING

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

JAIPUR––The Indian view of animals, Help In
Suffering director Christine Townend admits, both morally
empowers her work and at times greatly complicates it.
“Many Brahmins, as well as Jains, cannot feed their
dogs meat due to their religious belief in vegetarianism,” she
explains, and do not feed cats at all. “This means cats and
dogs are often brought to us in advanced malnutrition.”
Euthanizing the animals is also difficult, Townend
adds, as many Brahmins and Jains also believe that they “may
not take the life of a dog even if the dog is suffering acutely and
is sure to die.”
Townend works in the shadow of paradox. The Help
In Suffering shelter is at the opposite end of Jaipur from the
Amber Fort, the palace-turned-tourist-trap of Akbar the Great,
a Charlemagne-like illiterate who consolidated the Mogul
empire, encouraged learning, protected wildlife, and abolished
suttee, the ancient custom of burning widows alive.

General Chatterjee and the Animal Welfare Board

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

CHENNAI––Named for the Buddhist emperor Ashoke,
who issued the first Indian animal protection law circa 240 B.C.,
Lieutenant General Ashoke Kumar Chatterjee trained to head the
Animal Welfare Board of India by commanding first the Indian
peacekeeping force in Sri Lanka and then the United Nations peacekeeping
force in the Maldives.
A former polo player, Chatterjee won the attention of
Indian humaitarians in 1976-1977 when he mobilized troops to relocate
horses and cattle away from severe drought in Rajasthan and
Gujarat. Retiring in 1990, after 38 years in uniform, he was
promptly drafted to revitalize the AWB.
Created in 1960, actually convened in 1962, the AWB
exists to implement the two sections of the Indian
constitution––unique in the world––which mandate animal protection.

Something in the air

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

CHENNAI––The hub of the Indian humane
movement is not Delhi, the national capital, but Chennai,
formerly called Madras, home of the Animal Welfare Board
of India, the Madras Pinjrapole, and the Blue Cross of
India––and point of origin, 30 years ago, of the Animal
Birth Control program.
Blue Cross of India-Madras vice chair S. Chinny
Krishna is quick to acknowledge that the many Chennai
activists still have their hands full. They are currently fighting
purges of street pigs and cattle, not to keep the animals
on the street but to prevent them from suffering cruel treatment
and slaughter.

BOOKS: Heads & Tails

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

Heads & Tails
by Maneka Gandhi
People For Animals (A4 Maharani Bagh,
New Delhi 110 065, India), 1993.
184 pages, paperback; donate $20.

“I have always detested milk,”
Maneka opined in the first line of her first
syndicated column, entitled Milk, Meat and
Animal Violence. “My son too refused to
drink cow’s milk when he was weaned, and
was given, from the age of three months, a
liquidized mixture of lentil and vegetable,
which he loved. Most children hate milk,”
she continued. “As soon as a child reaches
the age to make decisions, the first thing to
go is that nauseating glass of milk.”

Maneka, as in “manic, eh?”

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

NEW DELHI––Maneka, pronounced
“manic-eh,” is in India quite a common
first name. Yet headlines often refer just
to “Maneka,” and Indians know exactly who
they mean: Maneka Gandhi, the maniacally
energetic founder of India’s leading animal
advocacy group, People For Animals; foe of
corruption; fearless newspaper columnist; and
member of Parliament. She is lampooned
almost daily by cartoonists and fellow columnists,
but is also quoted thoroughly on subjects
that most others in public life dare not address.
“It was pyrotechnics,” the Indian
Express opened on November 1, describing a
typical Maneka speech to a local Rotary Club.
“Maneka had everyone scurrying for cover, as
she launched a loaded attack on policy makers,
parliamentarians, seminar organizers, and ‘all
those who make a big show of environmental
conservation without even understanding what
they are saying.’”

Do they see pink humans?

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

BENGAL––Cops, sociologists,
and commanders of troops know that males
without females may start fighting and
boozing––and that’s the problem among the
elephants of eastern Bengal, reports the
Wildlife Institute of India.
Normal Indian elephant herds,
they say, consist of one male to several
females, governed by the eldest female.
Adult males usually travel apart from the
main herd when no females are in estrus,
but remain under herd rule. Bachelor elephants
are normally just the grown but not
yet mated, and the very old or dispossessed.
Few and alone, they historically kept out of
trouble.

African elephants

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

Three years after “sustainable use” advocate
David Western replaced Richard Leakey as
head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, the service is
plagued by resignations, short funding, and poor
morale, Louise Tunbridge of the London Daily
Telegraph reported in early December––and elephants
in Tsavo National Park are under fire, while
Western’s own salary has tripled in two years.
“Glossy KWS brochures state that only 11 elephants
were killed by ivory poachers last year,” Tunbridge
wrote, “but security sources say the true figure is at
least 67.” At urging of elephant expert Daphne
Sheldrick, Tunbridge continued, the David
Sheldrick Wildlife Trust “paid for a tanker of petrol
to keep the Kenya Wildlife Service anti-poaching
teams going” until the new year, and “the British
charity Care for the Wild is paying to patch up the
park’s roads, which are in very poor repair.”

TROUBLE AT HSUS-SPONSORED SANCTUARY IN SOUTHERN INDIA

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

CHENNAI– –ANIMAL PEOPLE learned at press time
that the scheduled January 2 hearing of a legal action seeking to
remove Deanna Krantz of Global Communications for Conservation
from the management of the Nilgiris Animal Welfare Society was
delayed to February.
NAWS, a 52-acre facility in the Nilgiri Hills region of
southern India, a popular vacation area, was founded in 1954 by
Dorothy Dean, an English immigrant, and run after her death for
some years by an Australian couple. After they retired, Krantz,
wife of Humane Society of the U.S. vice president Michael Fox,
assumed direction of NAWS in 1996. She apparently received
funding from the Dean estate, the GCC-India Project for Nature,
and Humane Society International, an HSUS subsidiary. Warmly
welcomed by Indian animal rights activists and prominent Jains,
Krantz issued glowing reports about her improvements of facilities
and animal rescues, and her work was profiled–– from afar––by at
least two U.S. animal protection publications. When she ran into
trouble with local people, including a March 1997 physical altercation
with a female neighbor, she claimed it was over her opposition
to cruelty. When major Indian humane societies investigated,

Logging & grazing

January 1, 1998 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, Jan/Feb 1998:

SAN FRANCISCO––The 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals just before Christmas lifted injunction
it imposed in July aganst logging on 13 National
Forest tracts in northern Arizona and three in New
Mexico, and allowed grazing to resume on 715 leaseholds
that Forest Guardians and the Southwest Center
for Biodiversity alleged were illegally administrated.
Forest Guardians and the Southwest Center
for Biodiversity argued that the logging and grazing
could harm endangered, threatened, and otherwise
protected species, including the Mexican spotted owl
and northern goshawk. The July injunction had temporarily
voided 177 of the 202 grazing leases in the
Coronado National Forest. But it didn’t end the issue:
as the 9th Circuit verdict was imminent, Forest
Guardians on December 12 filed another suit, seeking
to remove about 10,000 cattle from National Forests
alongside four rivers in Arizona and three rivers in
New Mexico, on grounds they may harm 18 endangered
species.

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